‘Great.’ I squirm inside the suit. My makeshift outfit is not exactly comfortable: it’s essentially a chunk of smartmatter, loaded with custom gogols and fitted with a few extra pieces of kit like the drives. It feels like wearing a full-body suit of wet clay, and I’ve been inside it for nearly two days. The neural interface is improvised and crude, with a constant spillover of the gogols’ muttering into my brain. The thought of another hour in it, floating in the router’s outer layers, possibly hit by another traffic spike at any moment, does not exactly fill me with joy. Especially when the siblings of the cop thing could show up at any moment.
What about you? the ship asks, suddenly.
‘What?’
What are you going to do when this is over?
I have only faint memories of what freedom truly means, what I used to be. Of a manifold, chameleon existence among the guberniyas, the zero-g coral reefs of the beltworlds, the endless party of Supra City, dancing above Saturn’s rings. Finding treasures and stealing them. Being Jean le Flambeur. All of a sudden, I want it very, very badly.
‘I’m going to take a vacation,’ I say. ‘What do you think Mieli wants to do?’
The ship is quiet. I’ve never asked it about Mieli, not directly, and her recent death wish is not exactly something I want to bring up in a conversation. Even if I’m sure the ship knows where it came from.
For her, Perhonen says finally, I’m not sure it will ever be over.
‘And why is that?’
Another long pause.
Because she is looking for something that never existed in the first place.
And so, while we wait for the data storm in the router to die, the ship tells me what Mieli lost on Venus.
Mieli is glad of the quiet in the main cabin. The space is completely empty and bare after the ship cleared out the mess, just sapphire walls with white cracks where the hull is still healing. There was no time to salvage her Oortian things. She does not care: the songs remain.
Perhonen’s freshly fabbed butterfly avatars rest on the curving surfaces, like white flowers. The ship’s attention is elsewhere, in the target – a huge wedding bouquet of glass a few kilometres away, against the irregular potato shape of 90 Antiope. The thief’s minor crisis with the processing node appears to be over. The next step is up to Mieli. She reaches into her robes and takes out the thief’s jewel.
Mieli saw her first zoku jewel in Hiljainen Koto, when she was six. A Jovian sunsmith gave a dead one to her koto sister Varpu as a plaything. All the children huddled around Varpu to look at it while she spread her wings with pride. It did not look like much: a bauble barely larger than a fingertip, with a dim amber colour and a corrugated surface. There was something sad about it. But when they touched it, they could imagine touching the outside, touching the sun.
When it was Mieli’s turn, it clung to her palm like hungry smartcoral. And suddenly, there was a murmuring voice in her mind, not like any song she had ever heard, full of yearning and desire, so strong that she was afraid. It said that she was special, that she belonged together with the jewel, that she only had to let it in and that they would be one for ever—
Mieli spread her wings, flew to the nearest darkhole and, ignoring Varpu’s shocked protests, threw it out into the black. Varpu did not speak to her for days afterwards.
But the jewel that now floats in front of her is alive, full of slow, entangled light. It is a simple blue oval, smaller than her hand, smooth and cool – and it smells faintly of flowers.
When she touches it, there is a tickle that goes all the way to her belly, an offer of joining. Like many of the low-level infrastructure jewels, it is not imprinted on a specific owner. That’s why the thief stole it from the Martian zoku, of course. But the quantum states inside are unique: unforgeable, protected by the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics.
Unlike me. She quickly pushes the thought away and accepts the jewel’s touch. There is a sudden cool weight like a gentle hand resting on her brain.
She is a member of a zoku now, technically, part of a collective mind, bound together by quantum entanglement. This particular zoku is large but loose, devoted to maintaining and improving the common communication infrastructure through the System. She only needs to wish and the zoku’s serendipity engines will weave her desire into the zoku’s fabric – to be satisfied if the resources are available, in a way that is optimal to all the collective’s members.
Still, there is a price: the zoku may ask something of her in return – without her knowing. An idea may flash by, possessing her for a moment, consuming all her attention. Or she may feel a compulsion to be in a particular place, seemingly random, to meet a stranger who has a problem she can help them with.
Within the router, the thief is opening the Box. She takes a deep breath and lets the plan take over.
The metacortex passes her wish to the jeweclass="underline" a complex, canned thought she crafted with the thief and Perhonen, a request for the router to run a very specialised quantum algorithm. The jewel seizes her volition eagerly. Perhonen’s modified wings, emulating a zoku communication protocol, pass it to the router. Slowly, the wedding bouquet starts to change shape, like origami, unfolded by invisible hands.
Mieli carries out her part perfectly, as I knew she would. I wish I could high-five her as the mirror headache around me comes to life. But time is of the essence: there could be a new traffic spike any second, and we are going to need everything the router can give us. Through Mieli’s connection to the router zoku, Perhonen is feeding it instructions.
You had better move, the ship says. Here is the latest traffic heatmap. The suit spimescape flashes into a three-dimensional contour image, like a brain scan. Intricate multicoloured shapes change and pulse in front of my eyes. I stare at the butterfly avatar inside the helmet. It looks comfortably normal against the madness in the background.
I grit my teeth, feed the map to the suit’s pilot gogols and fire the ion drives.
It is like swimming through invisible currents of fire. At the back of my mind, the clock is ticking. After tense seconds of sweat-drenched manoeuvring, I reach the Realmgates.
They are where we figured they would be, a large chamber-like space near the centre of the router, close to the power source, in a blissfully bandwidth-free zone, eye of the storm. A cluster of cubes, glowing with a faint tinge of purple in my spimescape vision, each two metres to the third power. Realmgates: the universal zoku interface between physical and virtual. They translate you into the language of the Realms going in, and back into physics and matter coming out. Picotech disassemblers that take the quantum information of any substance, convert it into qubits and teleport it into simulated gameworlds full of magic and dragons.
Or in this case, dark war gods with a grudge.
‘That’s more like it,’ I whisper to Perhonen. The plan clicks back into place in my head, and suddenly everything is sharp. ‘How is Mieli doing?’
All ready to go.
I merge my quicksuit gloves together to allow freedom of movement and lift up the Box with my right hand – the left is still a tingling clump of regenerating flesh. I detach a part of the suit’s q-dot field and let go of it, keeping a sensory link so it feels like I’m still holding it, guiding it into position next to the Realmgates.
Forty seconds to the predicted traffic minimum, Perhonen says.